Album review: Sprints get music year off to a flying start with Letter To Self
Sprints release Letter to Self. Picture: Niamh Barry
- Sprints
- Letter to Self
- ★★★★☆
With their wonderful debut album, Letter to Self, Dublin’s Sprints have emerged as early pace-setters for Irish music in 2024.
The post-punk quartet’s full-metal onslaught has been compared to Fontaines DC.
But while there are undoubtedly parallels in terms of the forcefulness of their sound, Letter To Self is its own thing, playing by its own rules.
It is a record brimming with highs and lows and which veers, with easy confidence, from a shriek to a whisper.
Singer Karla Chubb has talked about her lyrics serving as a prism to explore emotional well-being and gender identity and her growing pains in middle-class Rathfarnham.
And also to interrogate the male-dominated nature of the Irish indie scene and of the rock industry here more generally.
But if the subject matter is often serious, the music is explosive and thrilling. “I’m going insane,” Chubb declaims on the molten 'Adore, Adore, Adore' – a single that showcases both her visceral vocals and the epic production of the Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox.
Gilla Band are renowned for their bulldozing riffs. Sprints, at full pelt, similarly have the quality of an indie disco wrecking ball.
“Do you ever feel like the room is heavy?” Chubb ominously wonders on 'Heavy'. As she does, vast guitars kick on, conjuring visions of a heaving mosh-pit in a sweltering club.
Turbulent tunes are paired with lightning streak melodies from a band who have recently packed in their day jobs to commit full-time to music.
That catchiness is their secret weapon. Sprints have named Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Pixies and Idles as influences.
But if the ghosts of alternative pop past and present haunt Letter To Self, its sheer, rip-roaring accessibility feels entirely original to the group.
This is a loud, uncompromising introduction. Yet it pours sugar in with the jet fuel and, for all its ferocity, ultimately goes down a treat.
